This is something I have been bringing from one domain to another, and have been wanting to keep it in one nice secure area.

The History of the Hunters Network.

Smasher and Mortious met in '97 in an online mIRC club named the Intruder Wing, prior to that Mortious had been involved with another mIRC group called the New Republic and had rose in ranks to lead that club.

The Intruder Wing was a club that used the games Tie Fighter, XWing and XWing vs Tie Fighter to RP and "battle". Eventually Mort and Smash rose to the rank of Admiral of the club (top 4 ranks) and at that time a great schism took place,

Mortious mentioned to Smasher about starting their own club and the Hunters Network was born. Tired of playing dated games, Mortious talked about opening a MUD, Smash readily agreed with no idea what a MUD was.

The HN started with a copy of SMAUG and tried to adjust it to be Star Wars based, with little knowledge of this, Mort struck out to find out what he could, and started looking at various "space" related MUDs. He stumbled upon the original SWR, and spoke with a coder, somehow he was able to talk the coder into not only giving him a copy of the code, but to set it up on his host.

Shortly after Durga got in contact with Mortious pissed that he had the SWR code, after a few emails back and forth, everything smoothed over and Durga was ok with the HN being the first MUD to use the SWR code from the original.

Mortious knew he needed help and brought on Gendi to help code. The HN quickly proved itself unique in the MUD arena eclipsing all other player base records even the original SWR.

In 00 the HN briefly closed the SWR doors and tried the fantasy arena after a couple players managed to steal the original HN code. At that point the original code was offered online as a free download for a short time. That codebase is still the core for a number of SWR based MUDs running today.

Not enjoying the fantasy aspect of the HN, it returned to its Star Wars roots a month or so later. And carried on as the number SWR MUD on the net. With the advent of graphic gaming namely, UO, the MUD player base suffered and the HN decided to shut down in 2006 after a 8 year run.

Now the HN is back and ready to continue writing its story, it has been almost 20 years since we first started, we have seen a number of players go from being punk pre-teens to adults with kids of their own. To say the HN is family is an understatement.

Some of the unique items the Hunters Network has brought to the MUD world (this is not a complete list):